


Mutiny

by Gehayi



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Puddocky (Fairy Tale)
Genre: DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?, Fairies (mentioned), Kings & Queens, Magic, Multi, Princes & Princesses, Rescue, Revolutionaries, Servants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 06:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14279457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: No, ofcoursewe didn't drown any of the women. Or the little dogs, either.





	Mutiny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lady_ragnell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/gifts).



> **Prompts:** I really get intrigued when the tasks come in. Why doesn't the king just name his eldest son heir? Why on earth does he pick the tasks he does (perhaps you want to give them different tasks that actually make sense for the future ruler of a country)
> 
> The most beautiful women in the world. The elder princes stuff carriages full of them. Do they get along? Do they even speak the same languages? How on earth did they persuade them to go along with them? Also, the king orders them DROWNED when they aren't as beautiful as Parsley. Save them, please! (If you want to imply that the little dogs he also ordered drowned were saved, I would be extremely pleased.) Surely some of them can swim, and they all dragged each other out of the water, and went home or had further adventures or fell in love with each other or other people. It's this tiny throwaway thing but it's so awful! They deserve a happy ending.

No, of _course_ we didn't drown any of the women. Or the little dogs, either. 

If anyone had asked us why, I suspect most people would have come down on the side of practicality. When you're a servant in an enchanted kingdom, you learn the rules quickly…and these were the tiniest dogs and the most beautiful women in the world. It doesn't take a magical detective to know that fairies, peris, Destiny, and/or Baba Yaga were involved with some of them. 

(To be honest, I can't see Baba Yaga providing a prince, especially one who was _not_ a Tsarevitch named Ivan, with a dog small enough to fit in a thimble. From what I've heard, she regards animals as servants and nothing more. But I can easily envision one of the girls as her stepdaughter or granddaughter. That's happened, and more than once.)

And—leaving aside the force of nature that is Baba Yaga—the last thing anyone wants is to have an outraged…entity, for lack of a better word…pursuing them for all eternity. It's not just a question of fairy godmothers. A surprising number of princesses—plus the odd merchant's daughter—are the children or nieces of fairy queens. Giants' daughters are almost always human-sized sorceresses of stunning beauty. And the ancestor of the prince who married Sleeping Beauty had an ogre for a mother.

You have to step carefully, is what I'm saying. You never know who you're going to offend. And the true but unpalatable whimper of "The king commanded me to kill! What else could I do, if I didn't want my whole family wiped out?" has never been well-received. It's a chicken-hearted excuse. I don't know how it is in other kingdoms, but hereabouts, even if you're petrified, you have to take a stand—first because it's right, and second because blaming royal commands has never set well with those who wield magic. None of us wanted to wake the next morning as enchanted beasts, birds or plants.

"Really?" people say. "You're afraid of being turned into a _plant?_ " And the answer is "Oh, yes." I know of at least two girls who were changed, one into a golden hemlock tree and t'other into a pepper plant. The only thing the pepper plant girl did wrong was have a hot temper. And the hemlock tree was the disabled daughter of a witch. The girl's older sister—yes, the "nice one"— wanted a bridge that she and her prince could use to cross a stream and just left her half-sister there afterwards. The girl ended up calling to Heaven to turn her into a hemlock tree so that her mother would recognize her. Not to mention that all the speaking, moving trees that spring up from the graves of dead mothers. _Something_ must be inhabiting those trees, even if it isn't truly alive anymore.

No one wants to be trapped like that, their own body turned into a prison. And that's assuming a curse wouldn't strike us dead instantly.

And even if _we_ escaped being cursed—most of us have families. Even those who don't have husbands, wives, or children have parents, brothers, sisters, or friends. Hexes don't always strike the offenders.

There aren't always cures, either.

Oh, and murdered people tend to come back…usually as ghosts, but sometimes as birds or harps made of the victim's breastbone. They're not shy about telling everyone—loudly and publicly—who murdered them, how, and why. That's a path that leads nowhere but execution. 

Not to mention that we didn't _want_ to commit murder—or at least not _those_ murders, though a handful of revolutionaries grumbled that they wouldn't mind drowning a king who gave orders to massacre people. (The two oldest princes, horrified by their father's order, countermanded it immediately, which was good of them but changed exactly nothing except that they were now technically guilty of treason.) Three of the gardeners said that they'd plant fast-growing thorns in the king's throne, bed, and chamber pot if one drop of the girls' blood was shed. One of the scullery maids—who might be a princess in disguise, we're not sure, but she's very good at scrubbing up and making soup—had fallen in love with one of the young women ages before and had vowed to travel to the ends of the earth to find her. The scullery maid wept pearls and diamonds until the cook gave her a handkerchief and told her that of course we weren't going to let her beloved or anyone else die, so calm down, sweep up the gems that are all over the kitchen floor, put them away in case we need to bribe anyone, and then go peel some turnips.

Wholesale slaughter of humans wasn't the only thing that bothered us. Quite a few guards mutinied at the thought of killing helpless puppies. And if any of the dogs had been harmed, the Master of the Hounds would have freed every dog and pup in the royal kennels and found a witch who would turn the king into a dog that hunts badgers.

Fortunately, I'm the one in charge of housekeeping. I know of plenty of rooms in the castle that no one bothers with. So while the guards pretended to drown the dogs—and, on the following day, the girls—the other servants and I prepared rooms for both in the western half of the castle, close to our rooms and far from those of anyone influential. They'd need somewhere to stay while we found homes for the pups and sent the young women…well, wherever they wanted to go next.

The guards were ably assisted by the girls who could swim. Mostly those from coastal kingdoms, though I thought I spotted several pirate queens, two daughters of sea kings, and one lovely girl who unfortunately became half-serpent every Saturday. (The bottom half. Don't worry. Everyone asks.)

Between the girls who could swim and the guards, no one died. And the head of the guards couldn't bear to look too closely at the mass of supposed "corpses" afterwards—his daughter, his only child, was one of them. It wasn't hard for the guards to carry them, swaddled in blankets acting as improvised shrouds, into the castle…allegedly to prepare them for burial.

Yes, we told him that his daughter was alive...after the other girls were safe. Don't look at me like that. We had to save thousands, and we couldn't put them all at risk for the sake of one.

We had a harder time with the dogs. Dogs don't play dead unless they're trained to. The laundry women ended up giving the guards wicker baskets with lids that could be tied down; it would be uncomfortable for the dogs, especially for the ones on the bottom, but they'd have air. The baskets were then given to the gardeners for—I don't know. Burial? Composting?—and they brought the baskets to the temporary kennels in the west wing.

Once the dogs were in hiding, we supplied bath water, soap, blankets, bedding, rushes for the floor, and warm food. The next day we did it all over again, this time adding clean clothes for the girls. 

Most of the girls were eager to be on their way, and who could blame them? _I_ wouldn't want to bide in the house of a man who'd ordered _me_ slain. But most also wanted to know why this had happened. _Why was the king so evil?_ they asked. _Why those tasks?_ For surely finding things or people had little to do with ruling. _Why didn't the brothers team up? Why didn't the two elder brothers follow their younger brother and discover the source of his luck?_

Unspoken was the most important question, the one I glimpsed in their wide and terrified eyes: _Why_ me?

So, each day after work was done and I'd eaten and socialized a bit in the kitchen, I'd troop upstairs with clean bedlinens for all, spotless clouts for any who might be bleeding, some treats they might enjoy—sliced white cheese and green apples one day, sugar-dusted lemon cakes the next—and a candle to banish a fraction of darkness. And then, once the bedlinens and clouts and treats had been distributed and the candle lit, I would sit down and tell stories about the king. 

The king was wed three times, and each queen bore him a son. (All right, we didn't know that the second _was_ a son until, at the age of seven, he told his father. The king was delighted. I think he believed that a fairy had blessed him, for he felt that having three sons was so much more appropriate for a magical kingdom than having a boy, a girl, and then another boy. No one ever bothered to tell him that the child hadn't been _physically_ transformed. Well, not then. He transformed his body once he was an adult wizard, though. Beautifully simple potion, too. Worked wonders for my granddaughter.)

Anyway. Three queens, three sons. The first queen was a broad, hearty woman whose kingdom had been at war since she was five. She knew not only how to wield a sword but how to forge one. She fell in battle while trying to save her homeland when the eldest prince was nine. No one ever found the body. I'm not certain that the king ordered anyone to look.

The second queen was an astronomer from distant isles to the southwest, as dark as the night sky and just as beautiful. Courtiers used to say that the stars competed to shine in her eyes. She was the one who insisted that the princes needed more than knightly training to be proper rulers…which didn't please the king, as he hadn't been educated. His father, who was a fool—and I had the misfortune of working for him when I was a child, so I speak from experience—thought that reading and writing were matters for scribes who worked for political advisors, not the business of royals. I think that the king, who never learned much beyond the alphabet, the numbers up to ten, and printing his name, felt that the astronomer queen deemed him something of a dullard. That may have been why he eventually had the marriage annulled by an ally of his and banished the queen, bidding her not to let the kingdom's dust soil her shoes for an instant once he'd commanded her to go.

So she left—tears streaking her dark brown cheeks, for she had to leave her little boy behind—but her head held high and her gaze fixed on the eastern horizon, where the constellation of the Longbow was rising. But even after the queen went into exile, the king couldn't keep the second prince away from books and learning. He tried, too.

While the first two queens were wished on the king—or he on them—for political reasons, the third was a young peasant girl that the king saw one day while he was out hunting. Oh, she was lovely—her long braids the red of fall leaves, her eyes the color of newly brewed ale, her skin nut-brown. She looked like autumn walking. No surprise that the king decided to wed her that instant. (It also goes without saying, I suppose, that the king didn't so much ask her to marry him as inform her that they would be wed at midwinter on a Wednesday.)

They married. The king was thrilled. The queen, poor soul, tried to be happy, but I don't think she ever achieved it. And I don't believe that she was a witch. She founded a few hospitals (both for humans and beasts) as well as an orphanage or two, befriended a few fairies, bore her son, and died. Not what you'd expect of a witch-queen.

The king was outraged that the queen had perished so young, and he let everyone in the palace know it. He seemed to have had it fixed in his mind that she would be there to make him happy for decades, and he wasn't best pleased to find that his one and only decision had worked out so poorly. The queen was dead, and all he had left of the marriage was yet another son.

Before that, advisors and uncles had made decisions for him, and there'd been a great many rows about that. After the third queen died, he didn't bother. He'd made one decision that had ended badly, so he wasn't going to try any longer. Foolish, but that's kings for you. 

He didn't make any decisions about his boys. We servants and a few tutors raised the first two and some kind courtiers took over the care of the youngest (though we could have reared them all without any help, thank you ). It wasn't until the king was starting to slip into his dotage that anyone with power realized that he'd never bothered to name a successor.

By then, of course, the princes were young men. And there were factions supporting each for the throne. The eldest, who was the ideal knight, was supported by most of the army. The second, who was the most brilliant of scholars, had the support of wise folk and wizards. And the youngest, who had the kind heart of his mother, had the support of most commoners. They'd all be good kings in their own way, but—and here was the problem—very different sorts of kings. And the king didn't want to anger any of the factions. I'm not sure whether he was more afraid of the overthrow of his line or of being cornered by a knot of angry experts all intent on telling him in endless detail what a dreadful king he'd been.

So he settled on three traditional tests of kingship straight out of feast-fire stories. 

I don't think the king really understood the point of the tests, mind you. The first test is to find the finest of linen, because most royals know nothing of how to judge it. In the process, they're supposed to learn how to judge not only the quality of linen but the honesty and honor of those trying to sell them fabric. It's supposed to remind princes that recognizing fine qualities in people, like judging fine linen, isn't instinctive, but something they'll have to learn how to do throughout their lives. 

The second test—to find the tiniest dog, usually, though sometimes it's been the smallest cat or once, memorably, a teacup-sized elephant—is supposed to teach royals about responsibility for fragile things. The smaller a beast, the more vulnerable it is. Terrible accidents—or not-accidents—can crush it in a moment. Rather like a country. And since princes and princesses on this test aren't allowed even one servant, let alone a retinue, they learn quickly how difficult, how dirty, and how _daily_ caring for a fragile living thing can be…even after you grow to love it.

The third test—to find the loveliest person in the world—is a trick. It's not a matter of finding someone who's physically beautiful (usually a woman, but it can also be a man or someone's who's both or neither) but of understanding what beauty truly is. Five generations ago, a princess became queen after selecting a consort who was frankly hideous but who had such a kind, generous, unselfish heart that everyone who knew him for two breaths deemed him the handsomest man who had ever lived.

But the king didn't grasp that the test isn't about choosing a wife for her pretty face. I don't think the youngest prince did, either. 

I'm absolutely certain that the youngest prince's wife—well, I suppose I must call her Princess Parsley now, mustn't I?—did not.

The two oldest princes likely understood. I say "likely" because of their wives. The eldest chose to court a merry, round young woman who is the commander of an entire fleet of flying ships—a bold, adventurous soul, both kind and brave. The second chose a healer from the north, a formerly bewitched princess who, like her eleven sisters, had been obliged to dance in a fairy mound, night after night, with an uncanny creature that looked like a prince but wasn't. She's spent a great deal of time studying magic so that neither she nor anyone she loves—and her love and loyalty are _fierce_ —nor any kingdom that she or they dwell in will ever be ensnared in fairy magic or witch's spells. She's gentle, too, with those she heals (and she's quite good at healing, especially when it comes to injuries to feet).

The four usually travel together. Why not? They're friends as well as family. And they're good people to call on in a crisis, for the commander can send her fleet to any land suffering from famine quick as a cat can blink, the healer has halted seven times seven plagues in various lands, the eldest prince is as good at preventing wars as he is at fighting them, and the second prince has a real knack for talking to—and listening to—dragons, fae, witches, and demons while not being tricked.

They're well-loved. They're well-respected. They're happy. And they're doing a great deal of good. Because of this, no one is fussing too much about bringing them back to court. In fact, I think the king is just as happy to see the back of them. He doesn't have to worry about factions developing…or anyone muttering, quite truthfully, that the youngest prince didn't win fairly.

Everything is calm for now. On the surface, at least.

But if, after the old king dies, the youngest prince and his Parsley are bad rulers, we servants know what we'll do.

We have the schedule for the commander's fleet. We know when her ships are due to launch or to make landfall; we have to, so that we and our brethren at various other castles can arrange for food, baths, clean clothes, and beds for her, her captains, their officers, and their crews. We have written the lists of guests for dinner parties where she befriended generals and admirals. We know which countries have been saved from plague or war, and, based on how they've treated us in the past, which leaders would be willing to return the favor. The castle messengers know the names of the strongest wizards and the strongest knights, and which ones are friends of either elder prince. We know where the condemned girls went and what heroic deeds they're doing by strength of mind, will, arms, or magic. We know how to get in touch with them all—or their servants.

And—thanks to the second prince, who "let it slip" the last time he visited, and that lad doesn't _have_ accidents—I know the word of power that can call upon dragons for aid. True, that's perilous and should only be done as a last resort. But it's still a weapon, and one entrusted to our hands.

Meanwhile, whoever rules or doesn't rule, our work must be done. We keep the palace running smoothly. And that helps keep the kingdom running smoothly.

We're servants of the kingdom, not the king.

The youngest prince and his wife had best remember that. For we'll be watching.

I don't think it will be hard to measure their worth. It's an enchanted kingdom, after all. 

And we servants and commoners—far, far better than the royals currently dwelling in the palace—know the rules.

**Author's Note:**

> The unfortunate witch's daughter who becomes a hemlock tree is from "[The Wonderful Birch](http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lfb/re/refb13.htm)", a Russo-Finnish fairy tale. The princesses who are daughters of sea kings are from "The Little Mermaid" and the Japanese story "[Uraschimataro and the Turtle](http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lfb/pi/pifb07.htm)." The healer-princess that the second prince marries is from "The Twelve Dancing Princesses." The merchant's daughter who's the child and niece of fairy queens refers to the original version of "[Beauty and the Beast](https://books.google.com/books?id=f7ABAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage#v=onepage&q&f=false)" by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. "All the speaking, moving trees that spring up from the graves of dead mothers" refers to various stories, most of which fit the Cinderella pattern. The human-sized daughters of giants who are also gorgeous sorceresses can mostly be found in Grimm fairy tales and in Celtic folklore. The girl who becomes half-serpent every Saturday is, of course, [Mélusine](http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2015/10/the-tale-of-m%C3%A9lusine.html#). 
> 
> The mysterious scullery maid got her talent for making soup from [Allerleirauh, or All Kinds of Fur](https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm065.html) and her ability to weep jewels from [The Goose Girl at the Well](http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/179goosegirlwell.html) (which is NOT the same story as The Goose Girl--i.e., [the one with the princess, the cruel maidservant, and the talking horse](https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm089.html)).
> 
> The teacup-sized elephant is a reference to a similar animal in Dhionelle Clayton's recent novel _The Belles_.
> 
> For those unfamiliar with the story of Puddocky, which my story is based on, [here's a link](http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lfb/gn/gnfb24.htm).


End file.
